Summary: Librem 5 will increase to $749 on January 1, 2020 and once Evergreen ships, will arrive at its final $799 price to reflect the actual final costs of the hardware, instead of being based off estimates.
In my opinion, that final increase has three motivations
I let Purism choose which batch they would put me in and they chose Evergreen. That is OK with me. I do not think I will postpone it further. Instead I can buy a new model after two or three years. Of course there will always be a better model around the corner but I am quite happy to get an Evergreen for my preorder payment (October 2017). I do not care about the camera but battery time is important. I think the new board design is an important improvement too. I can wait for software updates but the hardware will not change after delivery. This summer it will be interesting to see how the new hardware will work. Only if there are major problems I will move to a later batch.
Thanks to the Purism developers ! I am an engineer and know how hard it is to start from scratch. In fact I did not believe you could get this far :-). I put my preorder just to support the development of the good concept.
One more in there - I bought mine for $649 in March 2019, after it had been announced that once general availability begins, the price would go up to $699. Of course, it’s gone above that now, as explained in Purism’s posts.
